PBR for short grass

[gary]

I'm looking for tips to get a better result for short grass covering a large area without using tiling.

I'm using a large texture map at the moment (see attached) and am looking to make up a PBR file for it but am having difficulties sourcing a decent short grass normal map that will do the job.

[demostenes]

I dont understand your use case, why would you want to do this? Generally it makes sense to use terrain engine and prepare terrain there. In case of terrain engine to avoid tiling you have to mix two textures, or you can use child material as detail material with different tiling settings (you will loose some details from very close distance due to blend). You can achieve far better detail, than with one huge texture. And for distance view you can use diffuse texture, which can have photorealistic look. Just see unigine demos, how is it done there.

 

If you dont want to use terrain engine, you must prepare some mesh in tool like 3dsmax and do texturing there.

 

In both cases result depends on your artistic skills, how skilled are you in texture creating, there is no workaround. You can try for example Substance designer to generate your textures. Generating normal maps from diffuse texture by tools like CrazyBump suck, you have to do it manually (you need to have some photoshop skills...), or via sculpting in Zbrush for example.

 

Personally I would recommend to use terrain engine and buy some grass textures, there is plenty of this on the market.

[gary]

Thanks for the feedback. It's a tricky one. the client wants to keep the slight overgrown run-down look so I've had to keep the ground geometry in one piece with the grass spilling over onto the curbs etc meaning the different textures are bleeding into each other so I have to use a bespoke texture. I tried megapixel grass but it's too clean/clinical looking when applied to such a large area similar to how golf games treat their grass for example,  it's not the result I'm looking for. I might have to live with the texture I have.